The Productivity Paradox
Why do we feel everything must have utility? I have felt varying degrees of dissatisfaction within myself for as far back as I can remember for my inability to be…good enough, work hard enough, make enough money, and have an adult enough looking life. Enough enough enough. What is enough? Is anything? When people ask me what I want in life I feel I have always been more of a shoulder shrugged “oh you know…meaning I guess” kinda gal. What I want is to not feel anxious because I am failing something I can’t quite name and it’s tearing me apart inside. Can you give me that world?
This constant battle for a sense of self-worth, one that feels externally validated in a way that internal validation just doesn’t cut it, is directly related to my output. My ability to check off tasks in a never-ending mental to-do list, which drowns me in its endlessly growing grasp, is the only standard that eases the pressure I feel in my chest all the time. A list that nobody except me designs or sees. That’s the kicker kids, no one person has made or enforced this list for me. I am my captor and I am the prisoner. I prostrate myself at the feet of some little voice in my head saying, “Just get the next thing done then you can rest, oh but not until the next, and also don’t forget that other thing and honestly you will never have it all done you will forever be playing catch up so why bother?” Catchup to who? The more I talk to people and try to pin down exactly what it is that makes them tick, makes me feel they are the real adults and not I (a 32-year-old woman with a child for god’s sake), the more I come to find that most people have very similar internal dialogues. The majority of us are trapped in a cycle of trying to prove to the elusive ‘world’ that we do matter and we very much believe we are the only ones who feel that way.
Not that I am 100% purely at fault for this trap of terror I set myself in. I, like most of us, am influenced, shaped, and written upon by the whims and will of the world at large. I am a consumer, an organism that spends moneys and gets into debt and consumptions and exists as a product to be manipulated into:
1.) Acquiring other products; ever more products in a never-ending search for the ‘missing link’ that is all tasked with filling a very deep hole inside myself that can never be satiated. Also known as The Void.
2.) I am also a tool to be shaped with ideas and beliefs to be guided, coerced, and manipulated into living out these ideas which beget beliefs which beget values (or maybe it’s the other way around). Thereby, I ‘influence’ or affect those around me by either succumbing to their broken value system or passing mine on, generating a massive, never-ending cycle of comparison which leads to consumption which leads to production which leads to exhaustion and heads back to comparison.
See my handy dandy little diagram here. So technical.
The most important component of that cycle is ‘It’s never enough’. It just isn’t. We can’t buy our way into feeling like a person of value just as we can’t work ourselves into a place of inner peace. I say this as much to myself as I do others just as it’s so much easier to believe it for others than myself. One only has to look at my daily life.
As a mother person not currently in employment, I have now found myself in the position where I am no longer deemed ‘relevant’ to those who are ‘highly productive members of society’ which means they get paid money for their labour. Thus, I have been privy recently to what is a notorious waste of a brilliant resource. That is, the world not bothering to see the wisdomous gold of a mumma or dada who is at home raising a human and whose labour is largely invisible to anyone not doing that work. All anyone asks me is about my child, or am I enjoying my ‘much needed’ break from work? Three times in the past week I have heard variations of, “Must be getting plenty of R&R now aren’t we? Good thing your husband is working hard so you can really enjoy this time at home. Isn’t he just such a good dad”
blinks slowly, silently, withers and dies inside
Listen, not that my daughter is not great, she is literally a goddess and I worship everything about her, and yes my husband is a great dad. I am also a great mother and for godssake if my value and being can only be measured up against what I am producing in a non-family context and taking home financially then I guess my value is zippo. In fact I should just give up even talking with other grownups because what do I have to contribute? What is my social currency?
This is where the paradoxical maniacal madness of my mind sets in. I spend my days FIGHTING to prove to myself that I am someone of value especially when the work I feel like I am doing is not defined as work by those whose production earns financial recompense.
My spiralling thoughts:
Point A
I see the mental to do list floating in my head and realise that I need to get started on it in order to check off a task and earn my prize of…let’s say… going to take a piss. You see I, like many women, don’t allow myself the luxury of fulfilling basic needs without assigning it the status of a reward I have to earn through good behaviour and getting work done. How fucked up is that muchachos? Society conditions us so deeply down to the deepest canyons of our primal bodies to operate within a framework where we conflate essential need with earnings and methods of earnings with ‘tasks’ and ‘work’ and ‘to do lists’ that are dictated by conceptual ideas of a future version of us who is healthy, happy and whole because she/he/they have done all that needs to be done. BUT IT IS NEVER DONE.
Point B
I feverishly attempt to set my mind and body to perform a task on my to do list with the hope that completion will lead to satisfaction (heh….heh) and begin said task. UNFORTUNATELY, I am part of the modern day human race who is assaulted at every turn by a culture of distraction, attention deficit, disassociation and the conflation of inner peace/meaning with obsessively scrolling online and softening emotions through spending money. Sadly I completely disengage from Le Task within a mere 4-5 minutes and start thought spiralling. Time passes and suddenly in a panic I look to the list to start another task because here comes the emotional onslaught of shame and fear and the inability to return to the original task because I have now ‘failed’.
Point C
This cycle continues for however many turns it takes for me to give up completely in a tizzy. I am so bound up in the sense of my own inability to get things done that I am crushed by the expectations of the world that tells me (or I imagine it does) that I am worthless and will never be a real, successful adult because I cannot get on top of…
gestures wildly around room/life
…all of this shite. BT dubs friends this hellscape of productivity obsession happens usually ON MY DAY OFF or when I get one hour of free time because I have managed to get my baby toddler to nap. Aaaaaand I bet it happens that way for you too. Our global disease is one of obsession with quantifiable production. A self-improvement ideology controlled and curated by corporations that profit off of people becoming disembodied and internalising the belief that our validity in adulthood is defined by our doing. We believe we can’t measure up to these shallow concepts of performed life and we begin to drown in our minds because the mental load gets heavier and heavier when we feel like we can’t catch up. This robs us of our joy my precious, yes it does.
“.. internalized so much toxic capitalistic messaging such that sometimes I feel doomed to a life of burnout because even if I get these spare moments of clarity where I’m like oh my God I am not this person whose entire worth is based on my goal setting and productivity and ability to be this person I think I should be. At some point that messaging starts to take over again it is so deeply entangled in my body.”
I do, however, so love me some good tasty planning and organisation and here is another paradox. Restrictive (or maybe external results oriented) productivity is toxic usually because the parameters for success are not from us. They are forced upon us by a patriarchal, abusive capitalist society designed to keep us busy, keep us in shame and keep us distracted.
Et cetera et al. et tu?
Productivity can also be a positive dynamic in life particularly when it is part of your self-systems that help you with framing your space and time in order to curate an intrinsically defined reality. When the habits of productivity are implemented in a healthy, sustaining, and non-choking way in your life it enables you to find more freedom, it generates structure where things that are ‘work’ oriented stay within a boundary of work and things that check different boxes of life are given focus during times that make sense without a feeling of overwhelm, incompleteness or chronic depletion. Sometimes becoming adept at setting parameters around your motivation and production can help you to relax and truly enjoy the state of being; being in your body, being in nature, and being with your baby without trying to capture every cute moment on Instagram stories. When you are not weighed down by anxious, overthinking and you can fully lean into a task for the present moment it
Really I am just out here trying to figure out how something can remain valuable even if it doesn’t yield….results in the traditional sense. The overwork culture we are brainwashed into from childhood has us believing that our activities of being are pointless unless monetised. Just look at everyone on social media turning the minutiae of their daily life down to the time stamp into cute, aesthetic, marketable videos.
It doesn’t have to be that way for all and it hasn’t always been that way. We can find balance and a level of productive engagement with work, play, child-rearing, chores what have you, that doesn’t have us spiraling down a hallway of obsession and panic. Boundaries are good, I think, and standing up for clearly defined roles and expectations within your workspace and your home life helps massively too.